She arrived at the bus stop just in time. The bus was crowded, and she had to stand with people pressed so closely about her that she barely needed to grasp the handrail. She was held and rocked in the warm, undulant mass as the bus chugged up hill and down, stopping and jerking exhaustingly. Through the damp cloth and wool of their sweaters and coats, Margot felt people striving hard inside the bone and muscle of their bodies. They seemed horribly tense and mostly unhappy, but there was courage in their tension, and even hope.
“Stupid cunts. Stupid cunts are running the world.” The passenger seated before Margot glared up at her like an insulted snake. “It’s cunts in the command seat,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It really is. And most of them are guys.”
He wrinkled his brow and retracted. The Asian woman to Margot’s right tried to withdraw from her in distaste but got squashed against her instead as the bus wheezed uphill. Margot’s stop came, and she burst from the bus feeling energized by the little exchange.
The morning was a chaos of bad news and mix-ups. A client who’d been socked on the nose by another client in a support group was threatening to sue the clinic. There were six messages on her voice mail from a client who said his son’s foster parent was trying to kill the kid. Two of Margot’s clients had been denied further visits by their HMOs because they had “improved,” meaning that they hadn’t attempted to kill themselves recently. Margot waded in, negotiating the snarl of emotional currents that vied and buzzed against each other like agitated snakes. She sorted them, one at a time, handling each furious, vibrating strand with care, allowing some to careen past her.
She ran out of steam in the middle of a session with a thirty-seven-year-old woman who, although she knew she was pretty for her age, was having suicidal thoughts because she didn’t look like a supermodel. “I know it’s stupid,” she said. “I’m embarrassed even to mention it. But it’s all I can think about.” In spite of her embarrassment, it was all she could talk about too. “I don’t just want to look like that, I want the whole world to be like that.”
“Like what?” asked Margot.
“Static. With no feelings except, like, if it’s your birthday you’re happy, if your mom dies you’re sad.” She paused, as if she’d just remembered something. “I mean, I know the models themselves aren’t like that. They probably have the same stupid, ugly problems I do. It’s more the world as they represent it. Without any fucking awful complexity. Without any of this filthy shit.” She indicated her thigh with a backhanded slap.
After this session, Margot stopped for a snack of orange sections and cheese cubes in the lounge, where she listened to a social worker named Georgia say awful stuff about a colleague she referred to as “the big fat cow pig.” Then she went to the rest room, where two other social workers were talking about a woman who’d been in earlier, trying to have her daughter committed. “I don’t know about the kid,” said one, “but I’d sure like to put Mrs. Bitch away.” Margot washed her hands and pressed a wet paper towel against her forehead and temples. She looked at herself in the mirror, resolutely hooked her hair behind her ears, and for some reason thought again of Patrick.
Emerging from her room for late-night toast, she would pass his girl-friends in the hall on their way to the bathroom, or meet them smoking cigarettes in the kitchen. She remembered a beautiful girl named Helen, who had long brown hair and a funny habit of picking up random objects and immediately putting them down as if suddenly stricken with disappointment in this speckled ashtray or that empty fluted cup. Most of the girls seemed unhappy, but their unhappiness seemed integral to them, and in some curious way strengthened Margot’s impression of their integrity. They would look at Patrick as if calmly measuring the distance between him and them, as if they knew that his little area of private space was closed to them, but that was all right because they had their own little area they were planning to go back to once they got what they came for—although of course it often didn’t work out that way. Margot remembered one girl in particular, a girl she had glimpsed on her way past Patrick’s barely opened door. She had been sitting on Patrick’s worn mattress, waiting while he did something at the other end of the room. Her arms were wrapped across her torso, each hand grabbing the opposite small shoulder, and one small, gray-socked foot covered the other in a pathetic gesture of protection, but her downturned angular little face was proud and beautiful and full of tense, ready feeling. One month later the girl called Patrick and cried so loud and hard that Margot heard the sobbing as she squeezed past Patrick sitting on his haunches in the dark, narrow upstairs hallway with the telephone receiver between his cheek and his graceful shoulder, listening with a look of rapt, sensual sorrow.
For Margot, it had been quite a display. Although she could be attracted to males or females, she had little luck with either; her shy flirtations tended to be muffled failures, which started, then ended, with puzzled indifference, embarrassment, and trailing irresolution. It was almost a relief for her to witness romantic shenanigans, just to know that they actually happened. At least that was how she had felt at first.
The rest of the day she had an intake phone shift. It was an uneventful few hours, except for a slightly unusual call from a young man who said he was phoning not because he had a problem but to ask for advice about a disturbed woman who was harassing him. She had been calling him and writing rambling, nonsensical letters, and finally he’d had it out with her on the phone. He was worried, he said, about what she might do next.
“Let me be sure I understand,” said Margot. “Does this woman want to make an appointment, or . . .?”
“She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, and then they broke up and I started fucking her a little bit.” He appeared not to have heard her question. “And then I realized she was really sick—she was on all this medication and shit. I thought maybe it was the medication that was making her weird, so I told her maybe she should stop. She did stop, and she got so fucked up she couldn’t get out of bed. Then I got interested in somebody else, and so I told her, and she just wouldn’t leave me alone. First she sent me this crazy letter, and I just went and put the envelope she sent it in on her mailbox.”
“You . . . wait. If you could tell me what you want me to help you with, I could—”
“I’m trying to! So then she called me, really mad because I left her an empty envelope, and I just—”
“Well,” said Margot, “it—”
“I didn’t have a pen! I didn’t want to be rude to her—I mean, she’s so sick already. So I left the envelope so she’d know I’d gotten her letter.”
Margot was eating dinner when Patrick called, but she picked up the phone anyway. His voice was shy and warm. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. They talked while she ate with one hand, intermittently tucking the receiver between her shoulder and her head so that she could carve and salt her fancy take-out chicken thigh.
“I was remembering how we used to talk,” he said. “It always made me feel better talking to you, especially about relationships. And I wondered if you knew that.”
Margot mumbled how she’d been thinking about him too. Her mumble was also shy and warm. It was unusual, her thing with Patrick, she thought. But it was good.
“You always helped me figure out what I was really doing. Guys sometimes aren’t very clear about that.”
She hadn’t remembered doing that, but she liked the idea that she had. As if to reinforce the idea, Patrick began describing in further detail the relationships he had mentioned while they were standing on the street. It wasn’t entirely true that he’d broken it off with the masochistic phlebotomist, he said. Tricia still called him in the middle of the night when she was “in crisis” and came by his office in sexy dresses for free Prozac. Last week she’d sent him a birthday card that had a picture of an emaciated kneeling woman with her head thrown back and a tortured look on her face. “God knows where she found the thing. It was repulsive, actually. But still, it hit me right in the gut. I even brought it to the couples therapy that Rhoda and I are doing.”